


Born Into War

by suyari



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Ascension Compliant, Drifting, Families of Choice, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-07 03:31:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14071962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suyari/pseuds/suyari
Summary: She doesn’t understand how there can be room for her. Not here, not anywhere.





	Born Into War

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously: Contains spoilers for Pacific Rim Uprising as well as Pacific Rim Uprising Ascension. 
> 
> This fic is not pre-relationship. This fic is not a poly relationship. Everyone (especially Amara) is underage and if you're looking for this ship, it's not going to be in this fic. 
> 
> I just have a lot of feelings about baby pilots. And I am working through them the best way I know how.

The first thought in Amara’s mind post full drift is a wonderfully cognizant, _Woah_. 

She’d been doing sims with everyone, trying to find a Drift Compatible partner. It didn’t help that they’d all been together for months; training and running sims and figuring out who worked best with who. It didn’t help that they’d been through so much together. They were a tight knit group she’d been essentially gangpressed into joining. No matter how much she’d always dreamed of it. And it most certainly didn’t help that their scores with one another left absolutely no room for her. 

Her drift with Jake had been noisy and chaotic. She’d been too busy being dragged screaming into the wake of the pain that was the loss of her entire family what felt both too long ago and newly occurring. No one had prepared her for that and she didn’t think it was fair that they’d all had to work through it, but she was expected to just figure it out on her own just to keep up. 

But the moment Jinhai and Vik’s minds meet hers…

At first, she can’t even _breathe_. All of their memories are founded in the heroes of her youth. She sees faces she’s only ever known through media coverage up close and real. The backways of Shatterdomes and all the secret little hideaways she’d have given _anything_ to traverse explode into tangible factors so real it’s difficult to separate the sensations. Suddenly she knows the insides of Kaiju up close and personal. The fear of never knowing if her parents will live or die. The clutch of her heart and lungs in her chest as she watches them battle in the waters of Hong Kong Bay. Finding out about the wreck of their Jaeger only after they’re both in the hospital because no one would ever let her watch. She can feel the gritty marrow under her gloved hands, the cold seeping in through her radiation suit. The slide of a blade through skin and the wild thrill of a disobedience that may just manage to permeate the tight knit of a Ghost Drift that has taken over all of their lives. 

Rage and pain and loss and grief slide through and over her. She can hear the echoes of their childhoods in screaming clarity; lives them as if they were her own. Feels the betrayal like a knife in her gut. The anxiety of being the right kind of successor. The anguish of a life spent stumbling and falling in a blindness not of her own making. She’s Jinhai, watching her famous parents smile at each other, communicating with their bodies, so graceful its as if they’re dancing and she can feel how badly she wishes they could just love her with a fraction of that, how much she wants it for her own one day. She’s Vik, finding out she’s been lied to her entire life; and there is no going back once the secret’s out, there’s no way to overcome all the horrible things she’s had to live through, endure, survive. She’s both when they drift for the first time and it is not at all what they’ve thought it would be. It’s **_better_**.

She breathes them in, feels how much they love each other, how much they’ve grown together and for a moment, stalls. She doesn’t understand how there can be room for her. Not here, not anywhere. But Jinhai and Vik have been feeling her own past, living it as they come together as one for the first time. Can feel the space there. A space they’ve never looked at too closely, a space they’ve never had time to consider. They’re young and strong and older than her with so much more to prove. There are legacies to live up to and down from and lives to distance and reorganize. And in all the chaos their lives have become, the yawning distance that grows between them isn’t a bad thing. Because there’s a space that’s always been there. A space that’s always waited. Amara breathes and feels the world shift and finds she fits into it perfectly. 

She can feel them react. Surprise, concern, amusement, amazement...It all whirls around them and through them, spiraling out and in and winding them together. She opens her eyes and can’t say when she closed them. Turns to look and finds Jinhai smiling at her. Vik’s eyes are wet. 

There’s no way of knowing. They know this far better than she does, understand it for what it is. It’s crazy, it’s madness, it’s the world turned upside down even as its set to rights. She doesn’t know how she could have lived so long without knowing it was there, without wondering at the absence of a thing she barely understands and yet understands completely. 

And she loves them, she _loves_ them, she **_loves_** them. She can’t believe she could have lost them before she ever knew them. Can’t believe she could have ever felt so alone; not while they’re alive. 

Their lives, their feelings, their thoughts, their dreams, their fears float around them cast in a blue light. If she reaches out, she can touch them. Spread her fingers through the wisps of memory and emotion and all the things that make a person; all the things that make them who they are. They’re Drift Compatible and the Drift is strong. She knows this in her bones, even if she didn’t have the statistics blaring across her holoscreen. Can feel the part of her that is Jinhai, the part of her that’s Vik, the part of her that’s both of them and neither of them. She’s herself, but she’s also something all together _more_. And what’s most important is that for the very first time in so very long - perhaps for the first time ever - she doesn’t feel afraid. There is fear, because there can’t be courage without it. But fear is not as powerful as the love that exists in the souls of every person on the planet. The thrum of life, the hum of sensation, the vibrating surety that no matter what happens. No matter what happens now or then or in any time to come...she won’t be facing it alone. She will never be alone again. She will never, ever have to wonder, because she knows. She knows with every breath she takes and feels distributed among them. This all empowering sense of overarching awareness that the Drift brings, this all encompassing _peace_...She’s here. She’s _home_. She’s searched the world over from the confines of her all too small and dark corner of it. But finally, **_finally_** she has found the one thing that’s eluded her ever since she stood on a dock with a picture in her small hands and watched her entire world go dark and cold. 

Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, that they have finally found her.

Either way, they’re together now, as they were meant to be. And not even a rampaging Kaiju could change that. They shift in their harnesses, feel the Jaeger expand and contract around them like a behemoth taking a breath. 

They’re a _**family**_. At long last.


End file.
